July 2, 2004

A Hunched Back, a Searching Heart, and a Fiery Wit

By CARLIN ROMANO

"Man loves company, even if only that of a small burning candle," wrote Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), the Göttingen polymath whose aphorisms fixed the form in classical German literature.

Who but a lonely scholar would close the thought on such an image? When we think of the ilk before the age of electricity, isolation and solitude accompany each scribbler as default condition, as rebuttable presumption. And if erudite loneliness confronts us throughout history, so,